[MUD-Dev] Distributed virtual worlds - effort and physics

[Sean Kelly]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, ceo wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:

>> built-in longsword template.  The weapon might be plausibly
>> effective in the fiction of the destination world, but making it
>> work with the engine is another issue entirely.  I'm sure that a
>> normalized data format could be agreed upon, but making it useful
>> would still require a large amount of cooperation.

> Are you sure it is theoretically possible or practically possible?
> I've participated in several attempts to formalise things like
> this and each one has soone spiralled into an apparently
> bottomless pit of complexity.

I think if the goal is to share data between marginally similar
environments (RPGs, in this case), then I believe it is practically
possible to do this.  Though I'll admit I've never actually tried
it.

> I've seen attempts based on the P&P systems for transferance (main
> problem is that they tend to be GM heavy, i.e. require the
> existence of a human in the transferance algorithms), to attempts
> to do a "ground-up" physical-simulation style (hypothesis: if you
> specify each game-world in terms of a physics system, then it
> becomes possible to deterministically (i.e. programmatically
> without human intervention) transfer behaviour from world to world
> - with the proviso that you are not constrained by every rule of
> physics, e.g. energy / matter / momentum / etc equations - or else
> you insert invisible sources and sinks to make them work).

Any mapping will likely result in a lot of useless items, just for
the sake of practicality.  Say a player leaves a high-tech world
with a ray gun and ends up in Camelot.  The ray gun may make
conceptual sense within Camelotian physics, but the programmers
likely will not spend time creating the necessary graphics/code to
make the item usable (or even representable).  The result would
likely be a "useless generic item: ray gun" in the player's
inventory, and the data would be retained in the player's data set
so it could be used in a world that supports ray guns.

> I periodically check around the web to see if anyone's made a new
> attempt that is doing well, but haven't found anything yet. With
> current mainstream programming languages I think it's just too
> much work (for the programmer). Obviously, from the fact that I
> keep checking, I half expect to be proved wrong sooner or later
> ;).

I agree.  Creating a mapping between somewhat similar game engines
wouldn't be too terrible, but difficulty increases pretty
dramatically beyond that point.  I love the idea, but won't be
spending any time implementing it myself ;)

Sean
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